The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)astrophysicists got a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the universe with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope and found unprecedented detail about the events that took place in the first billion years after the Big Bang. NASA chose a small number of UCLA projects to test the capabilities of the Webb telescope.
According to the research, titled "Early Results From GLASS-JWST. XII: The Morphology of Galaxies at the Epoch of Reionization," published in the Astrophysical Journal, the first galaxies were cosmic fireballs turning gas into stars at dizzying rates throughout their whole expanse.
Engineers and technicians assemble the James Webb Space Telescope on November 2, 2016, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
How Galaxies Formed After the Big Bang
The study is the first to look at the form and structure of those galaxies using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, SciTech Daily. It demonstrates that they were not like modern galaxies where star production is restricted to limited areas, such as the constellation of Orion in our own Milky Way galaxy.
UCLA Professor Tommaso Treu, the study's lead author, said they saw galaxies form new stars at an unprecedented pace. With the incredible resolution of JWST, they could study these galaxies in great detail to see the star formation happening within them.
Treu is the director of the GLASS-JWST Early Release Science Program, whose initial results are included in the special journal issue. A separate UCLA-led study in the field discovered that galaxies were formed soon enough after the Big Bang just less than a billion years, burning off residual photon-absorbing hydrogen, delivering light to a dark cosmos.
UCLA postdoctoral researcher Guido Roberts-Borsani, who led the study, said that even JWST struggles to confirm the distances of faraway galaxies so it is hard to know whether the universe is transparent. JWST gas showed that it could not only do the job but also do it easily.
Those are two of many spectacular discoveries made by UCLA astrophysicists who are among the first to peek through Webb's newly opened window to the past.
Webb is space's greatest near-infrared telescope, and its incredible resolution provides an unrivaled glimpse of objects so far away from Earth. The light from their earliest moments has had enough time to travel through the cosmos and end up on Webb's detectors. Not only has JWST served as a time machine, transporting scientists back to the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, but the photos it's creating have become a family book with snapshots of newborn galaxies and stars.
About GLASS-JWST Early Release Science Program
The GLASS-JWST Early Release Science Program, as per SciTech Daily, was one of the 13 Early Release Science projects that NASA selected in 2017. The space agency aims to produce publicly accessible datasets and test the capabilities of JWST.
The project's goal is to figure out a phenomenon and time period known as the Epoch of Reionization, which explains how and when light from the first galaxies burnt through the hydrogen fog left over from the Big Bang and how gas and heavy elements are distributed inside and around galaxies across cosmic time.
Scientists believe that radiation released by the first galaxies and potentially by the first black holes caused hydrogen atoms to lose electrons, or ionize, preventing photons from "sticking" to them and providing a path for photons to move across space.
As galaxies began to ionize bigger and larger bubbles, the cosmos became transparent and lightly moved freely, as it still does now, allowing humans to see a magnificent canopy of stars and galaxies every night.
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